Sex trafficking is booming, Mexican drug cartels expand their business

When the black SUVs roll through town, Ladydi and her friends burrow into holes in their backyards like animals, tucked safely out of sight.

This is from the novel Prayers for the Stolen - set in the mountains of Guerrero, a part of Mexico where the drug lords are kings, and the girls hide to avoid being kidnapped and sold.

"This is an ugly parlour not a beauty parlour," says one character, a hairdresser. "I have to make little girls look like boys, I have to make the older girls look plain, and I have to make pretty girls look ugly."

The best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl."

Author Jennifer Clement, who is also current president of the worldwide association of writers, PEN International, spoke with Hack about the 10 years of research that went into her latest novel - research that saw her venturing into the cartel badlands.

It's a novel about cartels that have expanded their business beyond drugs.

"The problem with these drug traffickers is they're really now transnational mafias dealing in extortion, kidnapping and drug trafficking," Jennifer told Hack.

"What they realise very quickly is the best business of all is to traffick people."

"It's the gift that keeps giving."

You can sell a girl many times in one day. Whereas a bag of drugs you can only sell once."

A relative of an abducted girls holds her photograph at a demonstration in Mexico City.

Getty Images: Luis Acosta

Girls hide in corn fields from narcos

Mexico's drug war is a decades-long, slow-burning conflict that has transformed parts of the country into the private kingdoms of drug lords.

Few stories come out of here.

Journalists are routinely murdered and the violence underreported, the victims often forgotten unless they are tourists.

In December, two West Australian suffers were killed on a gang-plagued road in the Sinaloa district - home to a cartel that was being led by the most powerful drug kingpin in Mexico.

Here are some statistics that show how dangerous it is to report on Mexico's drug war:

Journalists murdered in the past decade: 80

People imprisoned for killing a journalist: 0

Estimated kidnappings in 2012: 105,682

Reported kidnappings: 1317

The drug war has created it's own literary genre - what's called narco literature.

"I felt the story about the drug violence in Mexico was very male driven," Jennifer says.

"All these novels with male characters - the women tend to be clichéd prostitutes and table-dancing girls.

"They're not real people."

Prayers for the Stolen is a work of fiction, though it has the kind of gritty detail and careful research normally associated with journalism and non-fiction.

Author and president of PEN International Jennifer Clement.

Supplied

It began with a chance conversation - Jennifer had been interviewing the women of drug traffickers, and learning how girls kidnapped in Mexico are taken to ranches close to the US border. There they are sold and then trafficked into the US to be sex workers.

She met a woman from Guerrero and asked how things were. The women explained families dug holes in which to hide their daughters, in case the narcos spotted them.

"Once I heard the story they were digging holes in the ground and when the parents saw these SUVs coming they would hide these girls in the ground. That was the image that gave birth to the novel."

She then started travelling to Guerrero itself.

"This particular area of the state of Guerrero where the poppies are grown and where there's state-of-the-art heroin labs, you can't go there anymore."

"It's a no man's land. Intensely violent and very scary.

"Hundreds and hundreds of people have disappeared. It's a war zone but a war zone without ideology.

It's pure capitalism. It's all about money."

Sex trafficking booming with heroin sales

According to Jennifer, trafficking sex workers from Mexico to the US is taking place at an unprecedented scale, and it's happening in parallel with booming sales of heroin.

"In the United States 15 years ago the big drug was methamphetamine.

"Now the US Government has really cracked down. The ingredients to make methamphetamine are impossible to get."

"This has created a huge boom for heroin.

"And it's very cheap."

At the same time, guns are being trafficked into Mexico, mostly illegally, and then distributed through Central and South America and overseas to Europe.

The cross-border trades are symbiotic: a river of drugs and sex workers flows in one direction, and a river of guns flows in the other.

The statistics are that if the guns stopped coming to Mexico, almost 50 per cent of US gun dealers would be out of business."

High-powered weapons seized during arrest of Mexican drug lord.

Getty Images: Luis Acosta

Avoiding 'censorship by machine gun'

As the president of PEN International, an association promoting freedom of expression, Jennifer believes in the power of literature to change the world. Even so, while writing Prayers she expected no one would care.

But the novel turned out to be a huge success, and it's renewed her confidence in the power of literature.

The prize-winning work has been sold to publishers all over the world and Jennifer was recently asked to present it to US Congress - a rare honour, especially for a novel.

In a country where journalists are murdered and "censorship enforced by machine gun", perhaps fiction is the best way of exposing the truth.

"Novels have changed lives and changed laws. If you think about Oliver Twist - that changed labour laws. Emile Zola's Germinal changed the conditions of miners.

"Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte changed property rights for women."

Nobody remembers journalism written at that time but we all remember Oliver Twist.